How your big data career is killing other jobs

Image: iStockphoto/Pinkypills There’s a lot of money to be made in data science, as a new O’Reilly report indicates. How much money? Over the last three years, “About half of [those surveyed] reported a 20% change [in salary], and the salary of 12% of the sample doubled.” With a median salary of $106,000 for US data professionals, those are significant jumps. Yet, there’s also a lot of unemployment. At least, for those people who data science helps to put out of a job. What Patrick McKenzie wrote of engineers is equally true of data scientists: “You’re in the business of unemploying people.” Data, done right, makes systems more efficient and, inevitably, “efficiency gains” generally translate into “somebody will lose their job to a machine.” But not all jobs. Gartner’s Svetlana…